Critic and academician, Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) included comments on Marvell in his inaugural course at Cambridge, which was then delivered at various locales in the United States. He was later to contribute an article on Marvell to the Sunday Times, 27 March 1921 (reprinted in the Tercentenary Tributes ed. W. H. Bagguley, Oxford, 1921), that added little of value to the earlier notice.

Extract from Shakespeare to Pope (New York, 1885), pp. 219-20.

In the long Nunappleton poem, then, and in that celebrated piece which is printed now in most collections of English poetry, The Garden, we find a personal sympathy with nature, and particularly with vegetation, which was quite a novel thing, and which found no second exponent until Wordsworth came forward with his still wider and more philosophical commerce with the inanimate world. For flowers, trees, and grasses, Marvell expresses a sort of personal passion…. His style, when he can put his conceits behind him, is extremely sharp and delicate, with a distinction of phrase that is quite unknown to most of his contemporaries.

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